Work Sucks - more than ever

Dave is my boss. Dave and I don't get along. Dave is quite a character. He is an older guy, but he doesn’t have a lot of experience on the job. He used to be a truck driver and got a programming degree at a night university about 6 or 7 years ago. I can honestly say that he is not a very good programmer. He used to be one of my co-workers. We both reported to another guy who quit a few months back. The company tries to promote from within. In this case they promoted Dave to group manager.

I suspect that they promoted Dave to get him away from the code. He is a sloppy coder and didn’t test his work very well. While he was a co-worker of mine I didn’t hide my lack of respect for his abilities. And he didn’t hide his dislike for me. I also didn’t hide from him the fact that I was starting to look for a new job (something that I now realize you should never share with *anyone* you work with). And then, in a quirky twist of fate, he became my boss. Whoops.

Now I get all the assignments from the bottom of the barrel – and more work than most of the other folks. Which is OK. I do like the work – just not the company or my boss. And I can do the work faster than most of my co-workers. It helps not having much of a social life either, as I can eat dinner from the candy machine and work late into the night without missing anything other than some bad sit-coms on TV.

Dave reports to Tony (more on Tony later – Tony hired me into the company, over Dave’s objections). Liz also reports to Tony. All of Dave’s and Liz’s workers are in a block of cubicles together. Mine is in the same hallway as Lynn’s office. My office is on the corner near the main hallway, hers is at the end of the cubicle hallway, in sort of a cul-de-sac – so there aren’t too many folks walking by. I take my coffee breaks in her office. We play backgammon on her computer and discuss the problems of the day loud enough for folks in neighboring cubes to know that we are collaborating on work. I probably spend too much time there because Linda – the group secretary – knows to look for me there if I am not in my office.

On Friday, I was sitting in Lynn’s office when Linda found me. "Dave wants to see you right away," she said. I got up and followed her to Dave’s cube.

Dave had his feet on his desk and was doodling on a note pad. "Come in" he said not moving his feet. "I’ve been going over the bug reports and you have been very productive in September and October. You passed even Eric on fixes in October, even though you were out for a week and a half. – that’s impressive."

"Thanks" I replied.

"So," he continued, still looking at the pad of paper "I’d like you to start leading the India meetings"

"You mean the status meetings with Sanjay?"

"Yup" he put his feet down and looked at me. "Sanjay and his guys are doing more bug fixing and I need them to coordinate their work with the project team here. We’ve had too many problems with them making changes that interfere with work going on here, especially in the last month."

"OK" I shrugged "Tuesday nights at 7:00, right?"

"No, I changed the time. It interfered with my baseball. It’s now at 5 a.m." He paused. Dave is a big baseball fan and goes to the local games as frequently as possible.

"Can’t we change it back? I don’t go to ball games." It's not even baseball season.

"I don’t think that would be a good idea. Sanjay will have most of his engineers there so we need to schedule it during their work day."

I felt my face turning red. Dave smiled.

"The meeting is in video conference room B."

"Can’t I call in from home?"

"No, Richard, communication works better when they can see you."

"Can’t I use a webcam from home?"

Dave laughed.

"Who else will be there from Sunnyvale?" I asked.

"No one, just you." He smiled again.

"Isn’t this supposed to be your job?" I tried to ask as evenly as I could.

"Yes it was. But now I’m delegating it to you. As a manager it is my job to delegate tasks to the people that will do them the best." His phone rang, he checked the incoming number quickly. "I’ll e-mail you the agenda. Keep up the good work, Dick" with a strong emphasis on the word “Dick”. He picked up the phone and turned his back toward me.

Dave had been on my case about the fix count since he took over the job. My counts were usually close to the average for the group. Eric is the boy wonder of the group, and has had the highest monthly fix count since he joined - he also held the group record (until I took it in October). He’s actually a really good guy and a good programmer. I gave him a bad time when he first joined the company – which I feel bad about now. Before he came on board all the managers were gushing about how great he is. He came from one of our biggest customers and knows the application really pretty well – so he hit the ground running.

About a week after he started working with us I found that he left his computer unlocked and had gone home. I added a startup script to his machine that displayed a file and logged him out. The file said:

"Security section has determined that you have not followed proper logout procedures – your computer was left logged in, unlocked, and unattended. This represents a security threat to company intellectual property. Your access to company computers and networks has been suspended pending an investigation. Your management has been notified."

I meant this as a joke, but the company is sufficiently up-tight that it is plausible that we might have a security section and they might take that kind of action. This really panicked Eric. I guess it would have panicked me too. He went to both Tony and Linda when he came in the next morning and tried to figure out how much trouble he was in. No one could figure out where security section was. No one was aware of any security policies requiring logging out. No one tried to hack into his machine and remove the script either. When I got in – around 10 as usual – I fixed his machine and apologized. Eric saw the humor in it I think, although maybe he was just really relieved. Dave though it was irresponsible and childish, and he let me know it. But he wasn’t my boss back then.

Anyway, in October I put in some extra hours and got my fix count higher than Eric's record before I went on vacation. I figured that Dave couldn’t argue with my productivity. My reward for the hard work is a weekly 5 a.m. meeting.

I’m going to check monster.com now

Thanksgiving

Enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner at Liz’s down in Morgan Hill. Liz is Lynn’s boss from work, and she is a great cook. (For new readers Lynn is my BFF and drinking buddy). We had all the standard Thanksgiving fare – turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy. But there was also turkey long rice, pork adobo, lup chong, lumpia, haupia, and a bunch of other filipino food that I can’t remember what it was. Liz is half Filipino and half every other race that has mixed together in Hawaii. She is from Hawaii too – it’s amazing how the Hawaii folks stick together even after relocating to the mainland. Her husband Tom is Jewish, I think from New York.

I brought 2 bottles of red that I thought would go well with Turkey. An '04 Ravenswood Shiraz and an '03 Sokol Blosser Oregon Pinot Noir – nothing extravagant and quite accessible wines (that means even non wine snobs can enjoy them).

Lynn brought her sister Stacey who is visiting from L.A. She’s a really cute kid. She is going to USC getting an advanced degree – masters if I recall correctly - somehow related to medicine. There was quite a crowd of other Hawaii exports there as well. We played a rousing game of "What high-school you went?" It’s a Hawaii thing.

The food, wine, and conversation were all wonderful. Someone brought a DVD of a recent University of Hawaii football home game, they are rarely televised here. This was shown on Tom’s new ginormous plasma TV. I am generally bored by non-participation sports, so I stayed in the kitchen and helped Liz clean up and chatted with Stacey. She didn’t care for the wine I brought, but opted for after dinner white zinfandel. After the game the crowd thinned. Tom, always the generous host, brought out a very nice single malt scotch that he had been given as a gift last Christmas. Tom doesn’t drink – but he knows that I do. It was an Oban, 14 years old, not too peaty, and really smooth and flavorful. I had a couple of glasses, neat.

The party was nearly over with Jim (Lynn's other half), Lynn, Stacey and myself left as the guests. We sat in the family room discussing work, sports, politics, the weather in Mililani and such. As it was time to leave Tom asked if I was OK to drive – although I wasn’t really drunk, the truth was it would have been a bad idea. Jim offered to take me home with him. "We have the guest bed," he said "I don’t think Stacey would mind sharing." I never know what to say to things like that. To be honest, the thought had crossed my mind (was it obvious?), but this wasn’t how I envisioned going about it. I really wanted to look at Stacey, but turned to Lynn instead. She made a slight – almost imperceptible - roll of her eyes. Liz broke an uncomfortable silence by offering me a room. "You’re welcome to stay here, we have plenty of room." They have a 5 bedroom house and there are just the two of them living there. I accepted Liz’s offer and took their guest bed.

Liz and Tom have an amazing relationship. They have been married about 10 years and even from a distance you can tell that it is still fresh. They are genuinely best friends and lovers. I have seen them disagree, but never be disagreeable to each other. Perhaps they save that for when they are alone, I don’t know. If I ever get married I’d like to have a home like theirs.

I woke up a bit before 6:00 on Friday with a pounding headache and a mouth that felt like a rodent had crawled in and slept there. (OK, maybe I was drunk) I took a shower and poked around the bathroom for some aspirin. I couldn’t find any. I changed into my clean clothes. I keep a set in the truck, along with a toothbrush, just for events like this. I made a mental note to add aspirin to my overnight kit. The headache was bad enough that I decided to head out to the local Safeway to get some aspirin. I also picked up some breakfast. Some fresh thyme, chives, and tarragon, a dozen eggs, some brie cheese and black forest ham. I couldn’t remember if Liz has coffee, I don’t recall her drinking it at the office. So I also got a pound of Starbucks and a bag of oranges.

I went back to Liz’s house and made the coffee and squeezed some oranges. I sat and read the San Jose Merc and had a chat with buster until signs of life started to emanate from upstairs. Buster is their pet ferret that they keep in a cage in the family room.

Liz came down first. "Good morning! I see you found the coffee maker." I offered her a cup and some orange juice. I started to chop up the herbs for omelets and began heating a frying pan I found in the kitchen. Liz protested, "Stop, you can’t cook breakfast. I’m still full from last night." I looked at her and could tell that she didn’t mean it. "Your mouth says no but your eyes say yes." She laughed and put a hand on my shoulder. "Have you ever had pork adobo for breakfast?" she asked. "We’ve got plenty."

"Thanks, but I’m partial to eggs in the morning." I really do love a brie cheese omelet. I made three and Tom was down by the time the third was done. Tom made exaggerated "mmm" sounds while eating. I love it when people do that - when they are eating my cooking. When he finished his fresh squeezed OJ he jokingly asked if I’d move in. "That’s the best offer I’ve had all week." I replied, "But the commute would be a bear from down here."

I headed back home at about 10. Scott (my housemate) had gone to visit his family in Yakima so he wasn’t home. Jason (my other housemate) was out somewhere but I didn’t know where. I sat on my bed and looked around at my room, my head still pounding. I had moved in more than six months ago and half my stuff was still in boxes. This isn’t what I had in mind for a bachelor pad. I went to the kitchen to get a bottle of water. When I got there I saw that Jason had left an empty can of chili on the kitchen counter and some dirty dishes in the sink. Hell of a thanksgiving dinner.

I suddenly felt terrible for him.